Creating a ‘Pure and Simple Despotism’

This chapter seeks to locate the political economy of conquest within a wider context of British politics in the age of transoceanic global conflict. The Second Anglo-Maratha War was both the most extensive project of military conquest as well as the least debated colonial misadventure. This war—the most ambitious project of military conquest of the long eighteenth century—was also a secret war. The orderly flow of information about a growing list of subjects—the financial health of the Company, political negotiations with Indian polities, military projects—had become a vital part of early colonial rule. Imperial governance relied on the availability of this information to such an extent that when its transmission was disrupted by/under Richard Wellesley, tectonic shifts in the EIC’s bid for hegemony could not be critically scrutinized. The structures that constituted a distinctive early colonial order—ideological privileging of the military over the civilian, elaborating a legal framework for conquest, nourishing a machine of war, restructuring the hierarchies of power, reconceptualization of land as territory yielding revenue—were animated in the war against the Marathas. The financial exhaustion wreaked by the war typified the political economy of conquest that created an early colonial order in South Asia.

A contested financial frontier: banking and empire building in Eritrea, c.1952–73

This article provides an account of the relationship between imperial Ethiopia and Eritrea in the realm of banking governance from the start of the federation to the last years of the imperial regime. It looks in particular at the relationship between the Ethiopian administrations and an Italian bank, Banco di Roma, which had its headquarters in Eritrea from 1948 to 1967 before moving to Addis Ababa. The struggle for control of the economic flows generated by the Italian bank is an index of the changes in centre–periphery linkages between Addis Ababa and the sub-regional centre of Asmara. Archival evidence highlights the multifaced nature of Ethiopian governance and the role performed by the Italian institution in providing alternative sources of diplomatic leverage and wealth accumulation to the Eritrean elite. It is argued that the extraterritorial status enjoyed by Banco di Roma until 1967 was actively tolerated by a section of the Ethiopian establishment, which resorted to an established pattern of imperial governance based on flexibility in return for tribute. This centre–periphery arrangement was harshly opposed by prominent Ethiopian officials from the Ministry of Finance and the National Bank of Ethiopia, who struggled to enforce tighter government control over capital flows within and across the country's borders. The National Bank's final success in the quest for financial centralization drained significant resources out of Eritrea, with adverse effects on the preservation of the pax aethiopica in the former Italian colony.

Policing Commercial Sex

This chapter examines the institutions in charge of policing prostitution, namely provincial governments, municipal authorities, and medical-police committees. The devolved nature of Russian imperial governance meant that the severity with which regulation was applied varied widely from place to place, often depending on the specific economic, social, and environmental conditions of localities. The dynamics of medical-police committees are discussed, particularly the tension between the police and medical personnel. The chapter also explores the complex relationship between ‘policer’ and ‘policed’ in examining the (often informal) relationship between registered prostitutes and the police. Urbanization, limited resources, and the inability, or unwillingness, to enforce policy meant that regulation consistently failed to meet its medical and moral objectives. In the early twentieth century, the Russo-Japanese and First World Wars widened the gulf between state ambitions and realities even further.

The Racial Structure of Sociological Thought: Colonial Modernity in Historical Sociology

Racism is central to colonial modernity, a global historical project tied to colonialism and imperial governance. Racism and its diverse historical manifestations should in theory be key areas of study for historical sociology: the displacement of populations, the dispossession of lands, genocide, slavery, the coercive exploitation of workers of color, and the creation of a way of seeing people through race. Yet, historical sociological scholarship has to date failed to address how racism and colonialism have structured the modern world. This, we argue, is the result of two problems: First, historical sociology’s ontology and vision of modernity does not see colonialism as central to and constituting the modern world. Second, historical sociology’s Weberian roots produced a methodological approach that detaches theoretical categories from specific historical contexts in the pursuit of generalization. This approach cannot capture the historicity of theory and thus address the subfield’s racial structures of knowledge. As an alternative, we propose that previously silenced anticolonial sociologists provide a different model for historical sociology, one that emphasizes the centrality of colonialism and empire in the constitution of modernity and locates theoretical categories in this historical context. We argue that to overcome the racial underpinning of its knowledge structures, historical sociology has to rebuild itself in this anticolonial mode.

Influential Women, New World Riches, and Masculine Anxieties in the Development of the Spanish Council of the Indies, 1524–98

Sixteenth-century Spain was at the vanguard of European collegiate bureaucratic rule and imperial governance. This article argues that its Council of the Indies became substantially more bureaucratic partly due to the influence of women. Vassals’ attempts to shape ministers’ decisions via female connections prompted the council's fundamental 1542 and 1571 guidelines. Subsequently, Madrid's anxieties about women's sway, and surfeits of Indies commodities, stirred misogynistic treatises, royal scrutiny, and an increasingly explicit masculine ministerial ethos. Women's influence over council operations nonetheless persisted, through near-invisible labor contributions and petitions. One female author in Peru even envisioned influential women directing the empire.

Extraterritorial Jurisdiction and the Dawn of the Protectorate

Chapter 3 discusses the indiscriminate extension of extraterritoriality by British imperial agents as a defining feature of British imperial legal techniques. From 1843 onwards, it is possible to discern a boom in the legislation providing for the exercise of extraterritorial jurisdiction and for the creation of consular posts. The term ‘protection’ was an inherent part of the discourse of imperial agents when they referred to the need to extend extraterritorial jurisdiction. In the context of empire, ‘protection’ proved a flexible semiotic tool that often understated the vast extent of intervention that went hand in hand with its use in legal settings. At the same in the meaning of protection as a military alliance implying control over external relations continued to survive and referred to the physical protection of African polities in return for their exclusive relationship with Britain. The growth of extraterritoriality is directly related to the genesis of the ‘colonial’ protectorate as a form of imperial governance.